Alas, it seems my tempered
enthusiasm, amongst all the frustrations, as experienced in Das Rheingold was very much a case of
having jumped the gun. Following a dramatically inert Walküre, this Siegfried
hits a new low. Either Frank Castorf is failing catastrophically in what he is
trying to do, or what he is trying to do is quite simply inadmissible – or,
most likely, I fear, both.

However much incoherence
might be trumpeted as an æsthetic principle, that does not make it appropriate
to the Ring. Wagner’s intellectual
method is rarely if ever Socratic, but it is exploratory, learning from
previous ‘answers’ to questions he has asked – the questioning always being the
most important thing – and attempting to ask further questions in response to
the answers he has found wanting. Ideas overlap, even come into conflict. What
his method is not is arbitrary. ‘So what?’ you might ask; ‘why should Castorf,
or anyone else, be constrained by Wagner?’ Well, he need not necessarily be, although
frankly there is enough in Wagner to keep most of us occupied for several
lifetimes. But it does not follow from that that just anything goes. By all
means question, criticise, even reject Wagner, but might it not be more
fruitful to engage with him in the first instance? And yes, that certainly
includes engaging with the music: not as ‘absolute music’, to employ that most
ideological of terms as coined – pejoratively – by Wagner himself, but as
drama. Castorf’s apparent total lack of interest in the score may be his
greatest weakness of all. Whereas Stefan Herheim has said that when words and
music come into conflict, he will listen to the music, Castorf seems to have no
interest in either. I thought even in Das
Rheingold that he would have been far better off offering his own version
of the Ring, doubtless cut and
interspersed with other material, somewhere other than Bayreuth, perhaps at his
own Volksbühne in Berlin. Castorf’s presumable resentment at not being able to
rearrange the text manifests itself most often in a disengagement which commits
the cardinal sin of being less provocative than straightforwardly boring.

For this staging of Siegfried – or of whatever it is that
Castorf has decided to stage – the revolving set alternates between a
state-socialist version of Mount Rushmore, its heroes Marx, Lenin, Stalin and
Mao a study in decreasing facial hair, and a place claiming to be Berlin’s
Alexanderplatz, though certainly not a depiction of any reality I have
witnessed there. Considered simply as set designs, Aleksander Denić’s work is
stunning; to have what is pretty much a station entrance with surrounding shops
created so convincingly is quite an achievement. (I hardly dare imagine the
cost!) But Castorf’s direction rarely if ever engages with the locations, let
alone with the work. Too often they seem merely to be backdrops, just as the
score is reduced to the level of an inappropriate – and, one suspects, for
Castorf, a tiresome – soundtrack.

Mime lives or at least works
in a trailer van at the foot of the mountain, and that is where the first act
unfolds. Our friend the actor – previously the barman in Das Rheingold, with a good few filmic appearances in Die Walküre – is the bear Siegfried has
tethered, except he does not seem to be a bear, since he manages to work as
handyman too. (It has now come to my attention that this man, who has a great
deal to do, and may well prove the only discernible thread running through this
Ring, is Castorf’s assistant, Patric
Seibert, which may or may not prove ‘significant’.) Siegfried does not re-forge
Notung, since he is holding it in his hand already, but occasionally he bangs
on something he does not forge. He will not in any case use it to kill Fafner,
who dies in a blaze of deafening machine-gun fire, once again a sign of
disrespect for the score. In the second and third acts, it is difficult to
discern any particular reasons why some of the scenes take place beneath the
heroes of ‘actually existing socialism’ some in Alexanderplatz, some, still
more confusingly, in both. A tendency already present in Die Walküre for the drama to descend into a parody of Doctor Who, the same characters – albeit
in this case, rather more thinly drawn – reappearing in different locations yet
carrying on just as before, becomes even more pronounced in Siegfried. ‘The lack of a coherent
location is the point,’ someone will doubtless say; if so, it is not a very
good point, to put it mildly, since nothing further is done with it. And that
is the problem with so much of what we see, that nothing is developed or even
related to anything else. Fifteen hours are too long a time simply to reiterate
a nihilistic point that anything and everything is arbitrary.

Meanwhile in Alexanderplatz,
we witness Siegfried with the Woodbird, her flamboyant get-up more redolent of
a Rio de Janeiro carnival. First of all, he fumbles around in a dustbin as a
substitute for sharpening his reeds. (The oboe contributions here, whilst
superlative in a purely technical sense, are not what Wagner wrote; the idea
seems to be that he has some sort of accordion/mouth-organ instead, albeit
still played by the oboe.) Later on, at the end of the act, he engages in full
sexual congress with the bird, thereby making his ‘discovery’ of Brünnhilde in the
third act more or less meaningless. I assume he is being portrayed as a liar,
but frankly had long given up caring. Indeed, at the ‘Das ist kein Mann’
moment, so poor is the lighting – a recurring and rather surprising problem
here – that, from where I was seated in the Festspielhaus, I could not see
Brünnhilde at all. ‘No, it is not a man,’ I thought, since ‘there is nothing
there at all.’ There was, but anyway…

In the meantime, we have
endured Erda as a sex worker, first of all spending a great deal of time on
film with some other women choosing her lipstick, then sharing an
Alexanderplatz café meal (waiter: Seibert) with Wotan, for whom we have a
charming video close-up of his eating spaghetti. Having thrown a glass of wine
over him, she returns and proceeds to maul him, resulting in a filmed blow-job
whilst the waiter returns with the bill. (He later showers his staff with
banknotes; the Wanderer tips well, it would seem.) That, apparently, is what
the peripeteia of the Ring, Wotan’s rejection of Fate, one of
the most extraordinarily profound scenes in all world-drama, amounts to chez Castorf. This is not alienating in
the sort of post-Brechtian way it seems to think it is; it is, I repeat, just
boring. A great deal of other irrelevant business appears on film. What had
been an interesting, truly promising device in Rheingold has now descended to the self-indulgent level of a Bill
Viola and his tedious
‘Tristan project’. The only relief,
albeit somewhat banal, is some rather conventional footage of a horse in a
forest: Grane, I presume, though perhaps that would make too much sense. The
ending – in which crocodiles wander around Alexanderplatz, Brünnhilde sticking
a table umbrella into one of their mouths, a woman (the Woodbird shorn of her
wings, I think) climbing inside another, only to climb back out, briefly renew
proceedings with Siegfried, only to be pushed aside by Brünnhilde – is something
for which I have yet to develop appropriate vocabulary.

Kirill Petrenko repeated his
good work from Die Walküre, a great
improvement upon his peremptory, straitjacketed Rheingold. This is not the well-nigh all-encompassing Wagner of a
Barenboim – though in a sense, how could it be, with Castorf plying his wares
on stage? There was a good sense of line and, again, a still finer sense of
dynamic contrast. With the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra on excellent form – such
depth in the string tone, such piquancy in the woodwind, such power that yet
proves infinitely yielding in the brass – this might well be a Ring worth hearing on the radio.

At least, that is, if one can
put up with a cast which yet again falls considerably short of what Bayreuth
ought to be able to engage. The only member of this evening’s cast who could
reasonably be considered world-class was Burkhard Ulrich’s Mime. If he resorted
on stage to frequent imitation of Heinz Zednik, then that was doubtless a
consequence of the lack of Personenregie.
Vocally and verbally, he put Lance Ryan’s shouted Siegfried to shame. One could
put up with a bit of vocal roughness, were there discernible interest in the
words, but, whatever Ryan’s skill in navigating the crevasses of Mount Rushmore,
there was little to detain the ear here. Catherine Foster’s likeable Brünnhilde
remained a positive point, though again, this was hardly Nina Stemme – and,
again, Foster seemed overly reliant upon the prompter. Wolfgang Koch’s Wanderer
was, within Castorf’s constraints, well-acted and well-enough sung, but tended
towards the merely petulant, with none of the wisdom (and darkness of tone)
that the role really requires. Oleg Bryjak was booed – bafflingly – as Alberich;
he was certainly in the top half of the cast, if nothing out of the ordinary.
Sorin Caliban made for a decent enough Fafner, if again nothing memorable.
Nadine Weissmann’s Erda was tremulous and – even in vocal terms – lacking in
dignity. Mirella Hagen’s Woodbird was straightforwardly inadequate. If this
were a cast in a middle-ranking regional house, one would probably think more
highly of it. But this is Bayreuth, and deserves better.

If Frank Castorf’s Rheingold proves somewhat frustrating in
its alternation between genuine dramatic power and what seemed to be boredom on
the director’s part, frustration here in Die
Walküre tilts more strongly in the direction of the latter. It is
eventually revealed that we are in Azerbaijan, oil exploration rearing its head
more overtly: Baku, 1942, for some reason, or not. So far, in its reversion
from a later-twentieth century Rheingold,
so ‘post-dramatic’, perhaps. Wagner plays with time, of course, especially
through his web of motifs; he even, like the Bible, has two creation myths,
that of Alberich in the first scene of Das
Rheingold, that of Wotan as recounted by the Norns in Götterdämmerung. Narrations provide us with new information, new
standpoints, but there is nevertheless always a coherent narrative, however
incomplete it may be. In Wagner, that is. In Castorf, incoherence seems
deliberately to be the thing. That might be interesting, but the problem is
more that relatively little is done with it. A decidedly sporadic engagement
with Wagner results in something which, ironically, comes more and more to
resemble an old-fashioned approach of ‘park and bark’.

Too much of what we see proves
to be just a setting, against which the singers essentially sing their parts. Aleksander
Denić ingenious set, Hunding’s farm house transforming into an oil well, and
film clips showing anything and everything from a woman eating cake to an issue
of Pravda, a man on the telephone (it
later seems that he might be Wotan, but our unreliable narration kicks in
again, not unfruitfully) to a reappearance for the Rheingold barman, now in Azerbaijani oil man guise, are too often
little more than scenery. I can only assume that Wotan’s delivery of his
second-act monologue is purposely stationary, even un-directed: attempted
deconstruction, perhaps, of the plethora of action in Castorf’s Rheingold, a reinstatement, presumably
contemptuous, of ‘opera’ as he perceives it, but certainly not as Wagner did.
Certainly Fricka’s mad behaviour is the most conventionally ‘operatic’ I have
ever seen and could hardly contrast more strongly with Wotan’s subsequent
standing and (mostly) delivering. Much the same happens in the greater part of
the third act, once the other Valkyries, some with horned helmets, have
departed the scene. It frankly becomes boring, the impression having been
given, rightly or wrongly, that often the singers have been left to fend for
themselves.

Castorf seemingly has little
interest in the Lenz of the Volsungs’
love, Siegmund’s heroic rejection of Valhalla, or the relationship between
Wotan and Brünnhilde, and in much else besides, without succeeding in putting
anything in their place. Romanticism, or something akin to it, is presumably
part of the problem – but that should surely prove a spur to criticism rather
than an aid to indifference. It seems less a matter of failing to explore or to
deconstruct Wagner’s ideas than of never having bothered to consider them in
the first place. Narrative incoherence is clearly part of the point, but, even
with the film, it does not carry enough weight to compensate for what is lost.
And there is a very thin line between incoherence as an æsthetic principle and
incoherence by default.

Kirill Petrenko’s conducting
had improved considerably. After a largely one-dimensional Rheingold, there was far greater ebb and flow here. If tempi
remained on the fast side, the music was nevertheless allowed to breathe, which
was just as well, given how much it had to fend for itself. There was far
greater variegation, woodwind lines in particular gaining new life, and
impressive dynamic range: none of Pierre Monteux’s ‘indifference of mezzo forte’. Climaxes could have been
more shattering, but they were generally well placed and well approached. It is
difficult to know how differently Petrenko would approach the work in another
production, but I wonder how much a laudable desire to unite music and Wagner’s
‘gesture’ had initially led to subordination of the former, only for Castorf’s
apparent dramatic abdication in Die
Walküre to be met with a greater role for Petrenko here. Perhaps Siegfried and Götterdämmerung will provide further hints.

Wolfgang Koch’s Wotan is too
baritonal truly to plumb the dramatic depths, but his Act III anger was
devastating to hear (if not to see). After a disastrous start, her Hojotohos
out of sync with the orchestra, Catherine Foster recovered with considerable
credit as Brünnhilde. Her diction is not always as clear as it might be; indeed,
there were, unless my ears deceived me, a few lapses with regard to the poem
itself. But she is a likeable singer, who draws one in, has one sympathise.
Anja Kampe had some rough moments, especially earlier on, but offered a
performance of true dramatic fire; she, it seemed, was really the only one who
could provide the direction Castorf apparently declined. At her best, she was
mesmerising, even shattering. In Johan Botha, it was a joy to have someone who can sing the
role of Siegmund with such ease. His swordsmanship, however, was embarrassing,
his acting skills remaining at best rudimentary. Kwangchul Youn’s Hunding was
powerfully, menacingly sung, his attention to words as well as music an object
lesson, not least to the director. Claudia Mahnke’s ‘operatic’ Fricka was
rather hit and miss, just as in Das
Rheingold. The Valkyries were a generally impressive bunch, with more of
Wagner’s poem audible and comprehensible than is generally the case.

So this is it: Frank
Castorf’s notorious Ring. There are
various caveats: what I see may well not be the same as what audiences saw last
year; this is only Das Rheingold,
with the rest to come. However, whilst there is a good deal about which to be
frustrated, not least the lengthy passages in which Castorf appears to lose
interest, or at least I lost interest in him, and whilst it would e difficult
to acclaim his attentiveness to, or even his interest in, Wagner’s music, this
proved of considerably greater stage interest than some other recent staged Rings. Guy
Cassiers’s production for Berlin (and La Scala) may have been blessed with
a superior cast and a far superior conductor, but its lack of any ideas
whatsoever made it an inferior production when considered only as such. Stephen
Wadsworth’s Seattle Ring was
similarly inert in stage terms. Ironically, Daniel
Barenboim’s Proms performances have proved not only the most satisfactory of
recent years, but perhaps of my entire Ring-going
experience, with the possible exception – again, ironically – of previous
minimally-staged performances at the Royal Albert Hall from the Royal Opera
under Bernard Haitink.

Anyway, back to Castorf. This
Rheingold has ideas of considerable
promised and moments of real dramatic power. The Texan setting of the ‘Golden
Motel’ on Route 66 is undeniably not one for those who want their Vorabend to develop in an elevated
setting; just as undeniable is the loss, common to many stagings, of anything
that might make clan Wotan something akin to gods in the first place. Ernst
Bloch may have said that these were gods without being gods, but that is far
from the whole of Wagner’s story. Listen to the score – as Castorf seemingly
never does – and you will hear noble inspiration in Wotan’s dream of Valhalla.
Wagner’s Feuerbachian understanding of religious inversion, which underpins not
only Wotan’s sacerdotal fortress but also, by ‘true socialist’ extension,
Alberich’s conversion of gold into capital and his construction of Nibelheim, is
disregarded, again as so often, in favour of something cruder, more one-sided,
far less interesting.

If we can take the debased
setting, however, and perhaps even wearily concede its validity in our
appalling late-capitalist plight, we shall find, alongside the irritations and
provocations, more to engage us. The use
of film, far too often a trendy addition which adds little or nothing to an
opera staging, here stands at the very heart of the dramatic representation. A
screen at the top of the motel relays events elsewhere, some of which we can
see on stage very well already, some of which we can see with difficulty, some
of which we should otherwise not be able to see at all. They may be in the ground-floor
bar, run by an initially hapless but perhaps ultimately successful, extra, who
comes in for abuse from Alberich, Wotan, and others, but has us wondering
whether he will prove a survivor in the longer run. They may be in the sleazy
motel room above, in which we first see Wotan dream of power, in bed with
Fricka and then with Freia. (The latter seems to me perfectly justifiable;
after all, is not the very point of the gods’ relationship with the alleged
goddess of ‘love’ that they use and abuse her for the promised immortality of
her apples. For apples here, we should probably read stereotypical ‘female
assets’ from American trash culture.) The faded quality of the film, its
distorted colours in particular, have us wondering – or at least they did me –
whether what we are seeing is ‘real’ at all. Katie Mitchell-style filming might
be taking place, sometimes overtly with a cameraman, sometimes covertly as
befits our surveillance culture, but discrepancies seem to creep in, whether by
design or by our own unreliable narration. The world of webcams and ‘reality
television’ is never far away: discomfortingly, we participate whilst we
disdain. Perhaps this is after all a neo-Feuerbachian inversion for our time. The
dialectics are certainly unremittingly negative, as befits a post-Adornian
world. And indeed the moment of greatest dramatic power for me was the truly
shocking covering of Freia with gold bars, the motel bed stripped to its frame
as, clad in trashy, eye-catching PVC, she found herself submerged by the stolen
hoard. In many respects, it was the most literally-minded scene of all, and perhaps
drew some of its power from (more or less) trusting Wagner for once, but
filming and voyeurism made it sickening beyond any depiction I can recall
previously having seen.

What truly frustrates, then,
is that Castorf fails to live up elsewhere to that promise. I could not help
but have the sense that he would have been better off presenting a Ring, cut as he would do so with other
theatre, somewhere other than the Bayreuth Festival, which could hardly have
been expected to acceded to his requests for reworking the text. (Nor do I
think it should have done, which perhaps marks me down as being of the
reactionary camp, but so be it.) The third scene in particular drags – and certainly
not on account of Kirill Petrenko’s tempi, which were uniformly, excessively
fast. Here I sensed Castorf’s impatience with Wagner’s narrative. It is an odd
thing not to find Alberich and Nibelheim of dramatic interest; too often,
though, they seem awkwardly tacked on to the rest of the drama. There are
smaller irritations too, for instance, irrelevant, noisy interruptions,
suchas Alberich kicking a beach ball
around during the Rhinemaidens’ hymn to the gold. (Their antics around the
motel paddling pool, filmed for ‘cultural consumption’ otherwise work well on
the whole.) The appearance of a rainbow flag for the entry to Valhalla
obfuscates. Presumably a ‘joke’ alluding to Froh’s rainbow, it adds nothing
since it is not developed. Is that what the gods’ going up in the world – or in
Heaven – really amounts to: the motel turning gay-friendly? In the absence of
any other allusions to homosexuality, it just seems silly. What appears to be
the drug-induced stupor of the bar guests, seemingly aroused by whatever
Donner’s summoning of thunder translates into here, is more suggestive, whether
intentionally or otherwise. Political and religious power does not only
stupefy, but stupefy it nevertheless does.

Rarely does there seem to be
any synergy between what we see on stage and what we hear in the pit. Petrenko
was – to my ears, bafflingly – acclaimed louder than anyone else by the
Bayreuth audience. His account was not bad; it was certainly preferable to the
aimless incoherence we in London have had to suffer time and time again from
Antonio Pappano. Line and, above all, drive were maintained almost ruthlessly.
But it was a musical account almost as one-dimensional, though not in the same
way, as Castorf’s stage direction. Indeed, I am not sure I have heard a less
variegated Wagner performance. Furtwängler – or Barenboim – this certainly was
not. At times, it sounded more akin to Toscanini conducting Mendelssohn. Fashionable
obsessive concern with Wagner’s early-Romantic roots hardened into something
very much of our time, a refusal or even inability to yield; Wagner was held
captive by something approaching turbo-charged automation. The orchestra itself
sounded more than usually ‘covered’ by the covered pit. Was Petrenko struggling
as much with the acoustic as with anything else?

There was a fine trio of
Rhinemaidens, which augured well, though such augury was not entirely to be
trusted. Wolfgang Koch’s Wotan grew in stature as the evening went on. Whether
by design, I was not entirely sure, and there were some early moments that were
straightforwardly rough, but there was enough here to hold promise for later on
– especially if Castorf allows the god to be more than a mere gangster. Oleg
Bryjak’s Alberich had his moments, but had a tendency to rely upon caricature
that shaded into crudity; when he permitted himself – or was permitted – to
concentrate upon singing, there was a voice to be reckoned with. Though Mime’s
role in Das Rheingold is not so
great, Burkhard Ulrich nevertheless managed to outshine his ‘superiors’ in an
attentive portrayal (at least in verbal and musical terms!) As Fasolt and
Fafner, Wilhelm Schwinghammer and Soran Coliban increasingly impressed too. It
was a nice touch to have a Fasolt who was actually for once a credible prospect
of attraction for Freia, whether or no she felt the same way. The brothers proved
increasingly differentiated in character through verbal and musical means at
least as much as through staging. Claudia Mahnke’s Fricka was initially shrill,
unalluring in the wrong way, but improved considerably. Elisabeth Strid’s
Freia, whatever one thought of Castorf’s stage portrayal, offered something
that went far beyond the merely tawdry. Nadine Weissmann’s Erda – her
fur-coated, Dallas-style appearance
presumably indicating a ‘classiness’ as elevated as Castorf is willing to
countenance – proved welcome in vocal contrast, though Petrenko’s hurrying did
her no favours. Markus Eiche’s Donner and Lothar Odinius’s Froh followed the
general pattern of really coming into their vocal own in the final scene. Norbert
Einst’s Loge likewise followed suit, though again, I think that was as much a
matter of the production as anything else. It is difficult, however, to believe
that, taken as a whole, this is the level of singing upon which Bayreuth should
be able to call; a standard at least approaching Barenboim’s Proms Ring should surely be the norm here. On,
then, to Die Walküre: with
trepidation but also with interest…

Once again, we find ourselves
thanking an unrepresentable being for Welsh National Opera’s commitment to its
mission. It is a sad state of affairs when a season that includes both Boulevard
Solitude and Moses und Aron
is considered exceptional, but it is – and is all the more so when one
contrasts such seriousness of purpose with the endless revivals of La traviata which, Die
Frau ohne Schatten notwithstanding, seem to occupy so much of the Royal
Opera’s effort. That said, if the Royal Opera has not undertaken what would be
only its second ever staging of Schoenberg’s masterpiece – the first and last
was in 1965, long before most of us were born! – then at least it has engaged
in a very welcome ‘WNO at the Royal Opera House’ relationship, in which we in London
shall have the opportunity to see some of the fruits of the more adventurous
company’s endeavours.

All of that would be more or
less in vain, were the results not to attain the excellence Schoenberg demands.
They were, in pretty much every respect, any of the doubtless inevitable
shortcomings being of relatively minor importance. This was probably the finest
work I have yet heard from Lothar Koenigs – to whose partnership with David
Pountney we clearly owe many thanks.There can be no faking the necessary depth of musical understanding in
this score, any more than there can be in Wagner or Brahms (or, indeed,
anything that matters). Koenigs’s textual clarity and clarity of purpose not
only enabled the drama to develop; they were in good part the Wagnerian
embodiment, even representation, of the musical drama – not the least here of
Schoenberg’s dialectics. There were occasional slips by the WNO Orchestra, but
in no sense did they detract from a wholehearted contribution, which might have
suggested that the work had been in its repertoire for years. (Recent Wagner,
Berg, and indeed Henze will have done no harm, but even so…)

Perhaps the most exceptional
work of all – though opera is, or at least should be, one of the supreme
elevations of collaboration over miserable, bourgeois ‘competition’ – came from
the WNO Chorus. In an interview to accompany Pierre Boulez’s second recording
of Moses, Schoenberg’s great –
alongside the very different Michael Gielen, his greatest? – interpreter and critic remarked:‘People always say that it’s not an opera but
an oratorio, which Schoenberg later turned into an opera. That interested me,
because I disagree with it. The chorus, for example, is the most important
character in the opera. It’s like a chameleon, speaking for or against,
sometimes even internally divided or emphatic in its support of one particular
party; it is angry, it is docile, it comments on the action.’ Musically and
dramatically – indeed, quite rightly there seemed little distinction to be made
– the chorus succeeded in fulfilling Boulez’s and Schoenberg’s expectations.
Whether en masse, soloistically, or at
various stages of in between, whether singing, speaking or at various stages of
in between, Schoenberg’s highly charged and often ravishingly beautiful choral
writing – I was often set thinking of his psalm settings – were faithfully,
viscerally communicated. And of course, communication, both its necessity and
its impossibility, is very much the thing in this of all operas; or rather, it
is one of the things, all of them, like the score itself derived entirely from
a single row, proceeding from the necessity and impossibility of representing
the Almighty Himself. If indeed that is who He is, for at least at times, an
element of doubt should and did set in, with respect to whether Moses is on the
wrong track all together. This is and was a drama, not a tract.

I had my moments of doubt
concerning the production too. Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, as revived –
very well, insofar as I could tell – by Jörg Behr present the entirety of the
action in a single, courtroom venue. Lawis of course a concern of the drama in several respects, the law-giving
properties of the twelve-note method involved in a complicated, dramatically
generative relationship with Mosaic law and the law of Creation itself.
Moreover, as Aron points out to Moses, the Tables of the Law are ‘images also,
just part of the whole idea’. That said, the idea or ideas of law do not seem
to be especially emphasised, and – without wishing for some entirely
impractical as well as undesirable Cecil B. de Mille Biblical ‘epic’
presentation, which would make only too clear the truth of Adorno's charge that grand opera prepared the way for popular cinema – it is difficult to feel, at least at first, that there is not an
element of dramatic constriction in the monothematic scenic realisation. (I am
not entirely sure what was meant by the description of having been ‘based on an
original design by Anna Viebrock’, given that no further design work was credited.)

(Aron) Rainer Trost

And yet, so long as one is
prepared to do some thinking – and anyone who is not should not be allowed anywhere
near this opera – it is perfectly possible to glean a great deal; what appears
to be constriction was in some sense also mental liberation, which again is one
of the crucial dialectics at work in the drama itself, concerned as it and
indeed all modern philosophy are with the Kantian antinomy between freedom and
determinism. Not only can the courtroom – if indeed that is what it was –
readily convert itself, sometimes with a little scenic rearrangement but above
all through the engagement of our minds, into a venue for political and/or
religious activity or, through Aron’s manipulative-representational skills,
into a cinema, upon which the crowd can watch the orgy, as we watch the crowd.
We, the receptive and creative audience – at least, that is what we should be –
have to employ our minds to represent what the Israelites were seeing, and thus
to engage in that very necessity and impossibility of representation of which
Moses and Aron spoke and sang.That is
not to say, of course, that we should never see what goes on; Reto Nickler’s
excellent Vienna production (available on DVD, under the inspired musical
direction of Daniele Gatti, with the Vienna orchestra playing this music as
only it can) shows what can be done with modern communicative messages of
advertising and pornography. But what first seems as though it may simply be a
cowardly – or even financially necessary – abdication of responsibility is
revealed to be something much more interesting and, at some level, even
provocatively Schoenbergian.

John Tomlinson’s assumption
of the title role was predictably imposing. There was a good deal of what Gary
Tomlinson has called the ‘Michelangesque terribilità’
of Schoenberg’s flawed hero, though I could not help but feel that the
melodrama was overdone in the final scene. Still, the tragic grandeur, very
much in the line of Wotan,of
Tomlinson’s Moses was unquestionable. Although he seemed to have tired a little
in the first half of the second act, Rainer Trost’s Aron proved a fine foil. I
am not sure I have heard so clear a contrast between Sprechstimme and sinuous twelve-note bel canto (with a good deal of Siegfried et al. thrown in). Spatial
matters played their role in the first act; placing on stage heightened the
unbridgeable contrast between the two characters competing on unequal yet still
justified terms. (One should never fall into the trap of saying that Moses is
right and Aron is wrong; Schoenberg tilts the scales but remains some way from
upending them, and there are certainly occasions when Moses is shown to be
unambiguously, even unimaginatively in the wrong.)

Were I to proceed to hymn
musico-dramatic excellence in the smaller roles, I should probably find myself
simply repeating the cast list. However, I shall, in the spirit of the work,
attempt the impossible, and single out Richard Wiegold’s stentorian Priest, the
exemplarily alert contributions of Daniel Grice and Alexander Sprague, and the
– literally – unearthly beauty summoned up by the chorus of six solo voices:
Fiona Harrison, Amanda Baldwin, Sian Meinir, Peter Wilman, Alastair Moore, and
Laurence Cole.For a work that struggles,
like Aquinas, with a theological via negative,
there was a great deal to be positive and thankful about. Three cheers to WNO!To read more about Moses und Aron, please click here.

Wednesday, 23 July 2014

One of the glories of the
Munich Opera Festival is its series of Lieder recitals: not those curious concerts one
hears of elsewhere, in which ‘star’ singers sing miscellaneous operatic arias,
accompanied by pick-up-bands who occasionally throw in an overture or two, but
serious song recitals. Londoners are, of course, spoiled when it comes to such
matters, with the Wigmore Hall unquestionably supreme in the world as a song
and chamber venue, but a festival in which Jonas Kaufmann and Michael Volle offer
recitals, the latter a late replacement for an indisposed René Pape, has
nothing to fear from comparisons. Pape’s promised programme had intrigued:
whoever would have thought of his luxurious, ever-so-German bass in Roger
Quilter? (Mussorgsky and Schumann were more like it.) Nevertheless, it was not
remotely a disappointment to be faced with the prospect of a Winterreise from Volle and Helmut
Deutsch; nor was it a disappointment in reality.

Having recently heard Kaufmann, with the same pianist, at the Royal Opera House, comparisons were
always likely to suggest themselves, however much one strained to take the
performance on its own terms. In the abstract, I tend to think that my
preference is for a tenor in this cycle, but, as when one hears great recorded baritone
performances from the past, the question never presented itself. Occasionally,
my ear reminded me that it was not hearing the ‘right’ key, but even when it
did so, I was not remotely troubled by the reminder. For, if there is no ‘ideal’
performance of this work in the singular, there are surely a good few ‘ideals’,
and Volle comes as close to anyone in the plural. His is not a performance
imbued with existential Angst from
the outset; this is not the expressionism of, say, a Matthias Goerne. Indeed, ‘Gute
Nacht’ sounded convincingly as a continuation if not from the end of Die schöne Müllerin – for the story
there ends all too clearly – then from the world in which much of the earlier
cycle takes place. There was plenty of scope then, for development, for a
different turn to be taken, but what that turn might be was not yet inevitable.
We might know that hopes would be frustrated, but we could sense, whether from
Volle’s even-handed attention to words, to music, to their alchemy, or from
Deutsch’s equal yet different dramatic precision in the piano part. Indeed, at
times it seemed, intriguingly and convincingly, that Schubert’s musical forms
and figurations, be they quasi-‘autonomous’ or clearly derived from the words,
were as much a driving force as Wilhelm Müller’s poem itself, Schubert’s still
under-explored closeness to Wagner made manifest.

Although I have not yet heard
Volle as Wotan, there was something of the god’s Walküre monologues to our hero’s self-laceration, one in which,
even at the extremity of, say, ‘Letzte Hoffnung’, this remained song, and
Romantic song at that. Part and parcel of that characterisation, and certainly
in no way opposed to it, was Deutsch’s pinpointing of the stabbing piano part:
never can it have sounded closer to that arch-late-Romantic, Anton Webern, than
here. What the most crucial turning-point(s) will be in this most chilling of
descents will always be a matter of debate, whether in terms of performance or
one’s own reception. Here, I could not help but think that it was this moment
of ‘last hope’, still more than the signpost of ‘Der Wegweiser’ in which the
moment of no turning back came. That there were several candidates, not
competing but furthering the claims of each other, spoke very well of a
narrative experience that held one spellbound throughout. The final extremes of
no room at the Wirtshaus, the
hallucinatory shining of three winter suns, and that terrifying, inevitable
numbness of a finely observed, quite un-hysterical ‘Der Leiermann’ took us
where we had to go, and in a sense, like the ‘hero’, we welcomed it as
necessary catharsis. This was a less operatic Winterreise than Kaufmann’s. (Not that there is necessarily
anything wrong with operatic influence, for every great artist will bring
something different from his strengths and experience.) If anything, I think it
touched me even more deeply, with an Innigkeit
that seemed to find its source in the very heart of German Romanticism. For
this seemed to be less ‘Volle’s Winterreise’
than Winterreise, pure and simple,
however illusory that idea(l) might be.

Orfeo (Christian Gerhaher) and Euridice
(Anna Virovlavsky) returning to him

Monteverdi’s Orfeo may take after Jacopo Peri’s Euridice but there is a gulf in terms of
quality between the two works. Renaissance opera though Orfeo may be – it really is very
different from Ulisse or Poppea – it stands head and shoulders
above any preceding essay in the genre, so much as to mark a ‘qualitative leap’
in the history of music. (Monteverdi’s dramatic madrigals are, without
question, equally worthy of respect and connected in some respects of style,
but they remain something of a different matter.) I knew all that, of course; ‘everyone’
does. However, I think it took this excellent Munich performance not only to
make me realise quite how true it is, but truly to feel the greatness of Orfeo as dramma per musica. Perhaps that is not so surprising; it was, after
all, my first Orfeo in the theatre –
and what a wonderful theatre Munich’s Prinzregententheater is! But it could not
have happened without such committed performances, and a largely convincing
staging. Even Ivor Bolton, a conductor for whom I have rarely felt any enthusiasm,
seemed at his best, certainly far more at ease than in later music, be that
later Monteverdi or Handel, let alone Classical or Romantic
music.

After two somewhat
depressingly routine evenings of Mozart, this new production premiere certainly
reinvigorated the Munich Opera Festival. I wondered at first whether David
Bösch’s production would prove irritating. However, the flower-power setting of
the first act does not get in the way thereafter and a band of musicians is,
after all, far from entirely inappropriate to a telling of the Orphic myth. (Who,
in any case, has a decided ‘idea’ of archaic Thrace, and on what could it
conceivably be founded, even if it were appropriate for a twenty-first-century
performance of an early-seventeenth-century opera?) There is an excellent sense
of nuptial delight before the trials to come, in which music – on which more
below – and production seem very much to be at one. As the plot thickens and
darkens, so in any case does the staging. The story is told well; it is
perfectly clear who everyone is, and what the characters’ relationship to each
other would be. The underworld is properly like the underworld, Charon’s (or
Caronte’s) gruesome throng transforming the tone, whilst there is humour
without undue exaggeration in the domestic yet divine relationship between
Proserpina and Plutone. A post-catastrophic setting for the final act is just
the ticket, though some may cavil at Apollo’s decidedly mortal appearance as
something akin to a war veteran.

The Messenger (Anna Bonatibus) arrives

If Bolton occasionally let
the dance music run away with itself, it was a failing of the right kind, both
bowing to and leading a properly infectious account of festivities. Otherwise,
I really have nothing to grumble about at all with respect to his direction. Monteverdi’s
extraordinary scoring – nowhere is the difference between Orfeo and the ‘Baroque’ operas clearer than here – does a great
deal of the work of course, but the delineation of place, character, and mood
were instantiated with great dramatic flair. A large continuo group offered a
ravishing variety of sound, and, just as important, guided not only the harmony
but also everything that unfolded above. What a treat to hear the regal organ
of Hades; what a delight to hear the celebratory percussion! The Zürcher
Sing-Akademie sometimes sounded oddly churchy: was that a matter of having had an
English choral conductor, Tim Brown, train them? The sound was beautiful, but
seemed more akin to Choral Evensong than to court at Mantua – or Munich. At
other times, however, a more properly madrigalian instinct kicked in, and their
musicality was beyond reproach.

Christian Gerhaher made for a
magnificent Orfeo. Without in any sense abandoning the beauty of tone and verbal
attentiveness that characterise his Lieder
performances, he managed yet to seem perfectly at home in this quite different
repertoire. Stylistically, he was spot on: neither too heavy with vibrato nor
parsimonious in a largely-discredited old ‘Early Musicke’ sense. Perhaps most
telling, however, was the realisation that it was in many cases the very
virtues of his performances in later repertoire that made this also an
outstanding performance; after all, if ever musical performance required equal
attention to words and music it is in Monteverdi and Wolf. (And if you ever harboured
a desire to see Gerhaher in the somewhat unlikely guise of ageing pop-star,
first a little reluctant, then throwing physical caution to the wind, this may
well be your only chance!) Anna Bonitatibus made a huge impression as
Proserpina, ‘operatic’ in the best sense: opening a new era for the fledgling
form. Her Messenger also tugged at the heartstrings, sentiment never tipping
over into mere sentimentality. Angela Brower’s Hope (Speranza) and Music were
distinguished in a similar fashion. Andrea Mastroni and Andrew Harris cultivated distinct roles as Caronte and
Plutone, whilst Anna Virovlansky’s immensely likeable Euridice had one wishing
to hear more. Mauro Peter's Apollo offered on a smaller scale the textual and musical virtues of Gerhaher's Orfeo. All of the smaller roles were well taken. Here was casting in
depth and in style: a credit both to the singers listed above and to the
Bavarian State Opera.

Monteverdi, then, lived in
the present, as he always magnificently does, putting to shame many of his
Baroque successors. It would, however, be a shame to forget some of the other
versions of this extraordinary work. How about an outing somewhere not only for
Orff’s Orfeo – the first Munich
performance in 1929, in the Cuvilliés-Theater, was given in one of his versions
too – but for Berio’s too…?

It had been a while since I had
seen La clemenza di Tito in the
theatre, though I spend a good deal of time on it when teaching. Alas, there
was little to cheer about here, save for some of the singing. Ádám Fischer’s
listless conducting only had me long for Sir Colin Davis, in the pit for the
sole convincing musical performance I have heard ‘live’; Jan Bosse’s stage
direction had me longing for just about anything else.

Fischer, first: his role was
puzzling. If anything, I’d have expected someone from at least the
quasi-authenticist wing to harry the score. And that is what the Overture
sounded like: grand neo-Classicism reduced to something impatiently knocking on
the door of small-scale Rossini (without the gloss or the bubbles). Thereafter,
however, Fischer tended to maul the score, rarely letting it settle at one
tempo or another. Not that there is anything wrong with tempo variations; far from
it. But Fischer seemed unable to find a general pulse for an aria, let alone
for any greater structural unit. The great public scenes were scaled down:
surely this calls for a reasonable-size chorus. Perhaps worst of all was the lugubrious pacing
of many of the secco recitatives: in this
of all Mozart’s works, we really do not need to dwell on them, since they are
many, they are not his work, and they are sometimes frankly unsatisfactory in
terms of where they tonally lead us. For some reason I could never establish,
they were mostly given with harpsichord, but a few with fortepiano. The
Bavarian State Orchestra played well enough, considering, but as with Dan
Ettinger’s dreadful Figaro two nights
earlier, it was difficult to shy away from the conclusion that the orchestra would
have been better off without a conductor. Certainly in this case, it would have
been better off without the more interventionist aspects of Fischer’s decidedly
peculiar interpretation.

Tito (Toby Spence) and chorus members

Bosse’s
staging? Ultimately, as a friend wearily remarked to me during the interval, it
reflects the seeming inability of a large number of opera directors to take opera seria seriously, as it were, let
alone to take this extraordinary late example of the form for what it is.
Caterina Mazzolà’s often drastic revision of Metastasio was acknowledged
neither for what it had become, nor for what it had been, and certainly not for
what Mozart transformed it into. It is difficult to discern any understanding
of the classical conception of opera seria as spoken theatre with
additional music having come into conflict, whether in work and reception, with
later-eighteenth-century æsthetics, which had ascribed greater importance to
music – unless, that is, it be nodded to by having the excellent solo
clarinettist sit on the edge of the pit to be looked at by Sesto and then later
by Vitellia. It is equally difficult to discern any sense of the political, of
this coronation opera as, in words I have used for an
article elsewhere, ‘a compulsory class in a school for ruler and ruled’. It is just all a bit silly, with various
people wandering around in ludicrously exaggerated visions of
eighteenth-century dress, the size of Vitellia’s dress especially ridiculous.
Wigs look as though I have been taken from an LSD-user’s vision of Amadeus. The trouser roles offer a bit
of gender confusion, in that the characters’ dress seems as much female as
male. And that is it: none of those ‘ideas’ is really developed, let alone
related to the work. The only other feature I can recall worthy of comment is
the general change from black to white between acts and the banal apparent
conclusion that the characters find themselves through the burning of the
Capitol. Of revolution, of counter-revolution, of Enlightened absolutism, of aristocratic
revanchism: there is nothing. What on earth the dramaturge was offering for his
fee I cannot imagine. And of Mozart: well, there is, if anything, still less.

Toby Spence had his good
moments, more in the second act than the first, but had some strikingly
unsteady moments too. He certainly was not helped by the direction, which seemed
limited to having him wander around uncertainly in a sheet. I felt rather
conflicted about Kristïne Opolais. There was no doubting the committed nature
of her performance as Vitellia, but the nature of the application was not
always necessarily appropriate. In the first act, she sometimes sounded as
though she would have been happier singing Puccini, forsaking Mozart’s line for
generalised ‘operatic’ sounds and gestures that have little or no place in his
world. The second act was much better, though, ‘Non più di fiori’ an undoubted
highlight, in which even Fischer got his act together to lead a strikingly
successful transition into the finale. (It was a rare, much appreciated example
of an ill-behaved audience not being permitted indiscriminately to applaud.) Tara
Erraught and Anna Stéphany were more or less beyond reproach as Sesto and
Annio, clean of line and clear of dramatic purpose – at least insofar as the
production permitted. Both would grace the Mozart ensembles of any house.
Hanna-Elisabeth Müller, the Susanna in that earlier Figaro, impressed once again as Servilia; if anything, the role –
and form – seemed to suit her better still. Tareq Nazmi’s Publio, again not
helped by a production which seemed to have the character down as simply a bit
of a weirdo, could have been more cleanly sung. And there we have it: an opera seria performance as if from the
bad old days, when the drama was seen as secondary to the singers, when the
music was barely understood for what it is. Not for the first time, I longed
for Gérard Mortier and the Herrmanns.